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Brennan IT

Brennan IT is one of Australia's leading and most respected technology solutions providers. Founded in 1997 to meet the business and technology needs of Australia’s mid-sized businesses, Brennan IT employ over 240 employees across offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Newcastle. The wide range of products and services encompass cloud services, data networking, phones, video and unified communications, IT security, software development, IT services & support, hardware procurement and software licensing. Operating 24/7/365, with the benefit of a local Australian Service Desk, Brennan IT’s technology solutions provide all the services you would expect from an internal IT department – and more – at a fraction of the cost and allowing a far greater depth of knowledge of the fast moving IT industry. The goal at Brennan IT is to make technology work harder for your business.

Raving Fan Tabs

Solution

The decision was made to implement Sage 300 ERP (Accpac) and the solution proved to be a great fit for their needs. However it wasn’t until the Enabling team became involved that the real benefits started appearing. Aberneathy recalls “We weren’t really making the most of our Accpac system. We were basically just doing the obvious parts and then Enabling came along and did an audit of our business processes and were able to show us exactly what we could do with the system and how we could improve our business and also handle the business growth as well.”

When Enabling became involved, team members spent a day on site and did a Site Audit to gain a thorough understanding of all their business processes and special requirements. Throughout the day they observed staff processing transactions, identified manual tasks which could be automated, and detected areas of inefficiency that could be improved. A detailed Report and prioritised Action Plan were then prepared, outlining the benefits that could be achieved by the introduction of new processes and software components.

With such a high volume of transactions and multiple companies within their business, Enabling immediately recognised the productivity benefits that could be gained from automating some operations within the system, such as intercompany functionality. Orchid Inter Entity Transactions was recommended to automate these processes. Previously, there were a lot of manual transactions being entered between companies and this was taking significant time by finance personnel to enter and balance. Automation was the answer. The payment process was also automated, using Orchid EFT Processing. Transfer of information between their external voice and data billing system was also very time consuming so the Enabling team wrote interfaces to give them strong control in this area.

About the Customer

Brennan IT now has an ERP solution that is well-tuned for their needs, leaving them self-sufficient in day to day operation due to the enhancements and suggestions of Enabling, and training provided in key areas such as financial report writing and automated payments. With real-time access to all sales information they are able to make strong business decisions which facilitate their business expansion.

Aberneathy is very happy with the ongoing support received from the Enabling team and would happily recommend their services to other businesses.

“My relationship with the Enabling staff has been wonderful. They were able to come along into our business and recognise where we were able to improve our productivity, improve our processes and basically show us how we could use Accpac to our greatest advantage.”

Scenario

Initially starting with a small group of staff, Brennan IT grew very quickly - with a rapid increase in both staff numbers and transaction volumes. Their existing QuickBooks® system reached its limit and was unable to cope with the increased demand of a rapidly growing business. They needed a software solution to help manage this business expansion.

Carolyn Aberneathy, Financial Controller, explains “We used QuickBooks as our finance system and that was great up to the point where we just expanded too much.”

Requirement

In any one day Brennan IT could have calls from around 700 of their active customers in both the hardware and software sides of the business. These high transaction volumes, combined with the need to annually invoice a database of more than 4,000 customers, meant their requirements demanded a software solution that could process these transactions in the most efficient and productive way possible.

“We needed something that allowed a lot more concurrent users and was able to handle the volume of transactions that were going through the system,” says Aberneathy.

Also running a highly specialised voice and billing data system, they needed this software to seamlessly integrate into the overall system design.

Results

As business has expanded at Brennan IT, with increased transaction volumes and the need for more concurrent users, Sage 300 ERP (Accpac) has proven to be a very robust solution. Time taken to transfer information between their external billing system and Sage 300 ERP (Accpac) has improved significantly due to interfaces provided by Enabling. Previously taking over three hours to complete, this time has reduced to less than one hour for the same task. In addition, the business has doubled in staff size, however the finance team numbers have not increased - thanks to the processing efficiencies introduced.

“Enabling came along and actually showed us what Accpac could do, showed us all the additional benefits and all the additional systems that work with Accpac. The intercompany functionality allows us to do a transaction in one company and it just transfers automatically into the other one perfectly. It saves us so much time, and productivity has increased so much. Also you don’t have to worry about the reconciliation at the end of the month as it just automatically goes into the other company,” says Aberneathy.